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Does this jettisoning of time-honored titles mean that the paperless classroom is also lacking a creator, controller and grader?  Is the paperless classroom also a teacherless paradigm?  The answer is in some regards, yes.  I have removed myself from center stage.  I have relinquished the need to control every class.  I have stopped seeing work as stagnant…completed and submitted by students and then graded by me.  I have let go of my need to pre-plan months at a time, in favor of following the path that unfolds as we learn together.  My classes are not, however, teacherless, just less about the teaching and more about the learning.  The students know that I am ready and willing to be student to their insights, that they can teach, create, control and even evaluate their own learning.

In the absence of my control, the students have many choices to make

Teachers often say that modern students are lazy.  I have long felt that as the shifting winds of technology began to gain force, we teachers were the ones who were unwilling to do the work of rethinking our roles and meeting the students were they were learning already.  Rethinking paper as the primary tool of class is a step in the right direction because it forces a rethinking of the how and why of teaching and learning.

What was clear today was that it was our relationship and their appreciation for the importance of ideas and my subject that remained one, two, eight or ten years later.

After all these encounters, these smiles, these chats and talks in the cafe, through emails and Twitters, what do I realize, what's the lesson? (Does there always have to be a lesson, Mr. Burke? they whine....). Relationships matter: you to your kids, you to your subject, kids to each other.

you can't teach kids if you don't know who they are or what they care about. The lesson is that if you don't know or care about what you teach, they will not remember it, will not value it going forward.

More than 20 University of Wisconsin Oshkosh students participated in a two-month teaching and advising project with students from Australia, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Qatar and the United States — all without leaving the classroom.

his “context of public scrutiny” is of great importance here. The safety of the self-contained classroom, one separated (by walls and firewalls) from the rest of the world - the world we are supposed to prepare our students for - goes against everything that surrounds young people today and prevents them from learning how to navigate the complex online world.

The idea is that we  should challenge thinking, inspire creativity, and stir up discussion with a Powerpoint presentation – not present a series of dry facts. 

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web.

in online education “tiny bursts can teach just as well as traditional lectures when paired with assignments and discussions.” The microlecture format begins with a podcast that introduces a few key terms or a critical concept, then immediately turns the learning environment over to the students.

“It’s a framework for knowledge excavation,” Penrose tells Shieh. “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.”

It clearly will not work for a course that is designed to feature sustained classroom discussions. And while the concept will work well when an instructor wants to introduce smaller chunks of information, it will likely not work very well when the information is more complex.